A Misunderstanding, and a Simple Life Descends Into a Nightmare

The heroine of Richard Flanagan’s stunning new novel is an Australian pole dancer known as the Doll, and like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock movie, she finds herself being mistaken for someone else and falling, abruptly, down a black rabbit hole, her identity stolen, her daily life torpedoed, her most fundamental expectations about life blown to smithereens.

Because of a one-night stand with an attractive stranger named Tariq, the Doll suddenly finds herself being hunted by the police and described on TV as part of a Bonnie-and-Clyde terrorist team determined to set off a bomb, quite possibly a dirty bomb, in downtown Sydney, perhaps even at the city’s iconic opera house.

SWAT teams fan out across the city in search of her; her apartment is ransacked; her friends are grilled and threatened with imprisonment. Images of her and her supposed terrorist boyfriend play on an endless loop on television sets and Jumbotrons across the city, while television reporters and radio shock jocks psychoanalyze her, defame her, mythologize the paltry facts of her life as they reinvent her as an avatar of all that is evil.

The Doll not only sees her modest hopes of a better life — “a life in which she had an apartment and an education and a job that people admired” — abruptly erased, but also realizes that she has been caught up in a gigantic political and media machine that she is helpless to stop. In three days her existence has been transformed. She is now running for her life.

Although the basic outlines of this story come from Heinrich Böll’s novel “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum,” written in response to the terrorism scares that Germany suffered in the late 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Flanagan has turned the story into an armature for a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world, a globalized world in which fear is a valued commodity for terrorists and governments alike, a world in which rumors and misinformation circumnavigate the globe in the flash of an eye, and narratives — constructed by politicians and tabloid reporters, and avidly consumed by a spectacle-hungry populace — replace facts and truths. Identity has become a commodity and construct in this world: something that can be manufactured, stolen or counterfeited.

“The Unknown Terrorist” may not be as ambitious as this author’s last novel — the astonishing “Gould’s Book of Fish,” a phantasmagorical portrait of a 19th-century forger that opened out into a Melvillian meditation on art and politics and nature, the evils of colonialism and the limits of Enlightenment reason. But if the focus of “The Unknown Terrorist” remains the contemporary world — rather than the cumulative philosophical and cultural underpinnings of several centuries of Australian history — it does an just as dazzling a job job of limning its subject, conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalized terror and trade, where drugs and weapons and human beings are smuggled with equal brazenness across borders and oceans, and money and power flow back and forth between the legitimate and criminal worlds, unnoticed by the crowds clamoring for more bytes and pixels and bandwidth.

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Richard FlanaganCredit
Susan Gordon-Brown

Mr. Flanagan makes the reader see the teeming, seamy streets where the Doll lives and works, and the swank neighborhoods where many of her customers have homes with views of the harbor and the city and the sky. He captures the nervous jujitsu that passes for debate and conversation in the streets, and the frenetic, strobe-lit pulse of the urban wasteland that is modern Sydney — T. S. Eliot’s unreal city gone Aussie and electric. And he’s written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known novelists with whom he has much in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis.

As we get to know the Doll — whose real name is Gina Davies — we see that she thinks of herself as a cynic, as a tough-minded survivor, whose abusive childhood has inoculated her against big dreams of love and happiness ever after. Time and again, she has picked herself up and started over — after the stillbirth of her son, Liam; after the death of Liam’s father — and she has set herself the practical goal of dancing until she has made enough money to buy a starter apartment and turn it into a home.

Then: “She would put herself through university, train herself, and have a job that was secure and from which she might derive some small pride. And always she would hold her soul close and precious, allow no one to take it from her and trash it. These seemed neither large nor foolish things, but something solid, a rock, on which to build a life.”

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And so she puts up with the daily humiliations of dancing at the Chairman’s Lounge in front of leering men. Among the patrons of the club is one Richard Cody, a has-been TV reporter, adept at embroidering stories, be it at the dinner table or on the screen. When Cody offers to pay the Doll for sex, she rebuffs him, and he will remember her — when a picture of her on a surveillance camera turns up the following day — hugging a man named Tariq, who has become the chief suspect in a terrorist bombing plot.

Cody comes to see Doll’s story — an Aussie girl turned terrorist — as his ticket back to the top of the tabloid television heap; it does not occur to him that she may be an innocent caught up in a series of random events and misunderstandings. And as the public frenzy, hyped by his television special, grows, the possibility of her innocence is also shrugged off by the politicians eager to use the terrorism scare to promote their own agendas.

The Doll’s best friend, Wilder, urges her to turn herself in to the police, to trust that “in Australia things always get sorted out in the end,” but the Doll becomes increasingly convinced that no one will believe her, that the people she’s up against can “take a truth” and “turn it into a lie.”

In Mr. Flanagan’s earlier novels “Gould’s Book of Fish” and “The Sound of One Hand Clapping,” there were glimpses of transcendence amid the senseless violence and degradation sustained by his characters — an appreciation of humanity’s resilience, its ability to alchemize suffering into art or to transmute anger into tenderness and redemption.

Here, however, the Stygian world inhabited by the Doll and her pursuers is without relief: Darwinian rules are the order of the day, and ruthlessness and self-interest are the ways to get ahead or survive. Indeed, Mr. Flanagan’s vision seems to have darkened considerably since his last book: in this stark and unsparing novel, set against the backdrop of the global war on terrorism, he gives us a Hobbesian world, devoid of grace and forgiveness and light, and headed, headlong, toward irredeemable disaster.